At noon on 5 October a reconnaissance pilot from the 120th Fighter Squadron reported that he could see a 24km-long Nazi armoured column moving along the Warsaw highway from Spas-Demensk toward Yukhnov. This was about 160km south-west of Moscow. Nobody would believe him. He was ordered to fly back and confirm. Now the undisturbed German column could be seen approaching Yukhnov itself. A degree of authentication was provided by the damage the aircraft received from anti-aircraft fire. Colonel Sbytov, Air Commander of Moscow Military District, decided this was proof enough and passed the urgent report on. He was immediately accused by the NKVD of ‘encouraging panic’, and his staff was threatened with court martial and execution. A third reconnaissance report confirmed the column had actually entered the town. Stalin was informed. There were no Russian forces on the Warsaw highway between Yukhnov and Moscow. Units in the capital were placed on alert and an ad hoc force hastily assembled to hold up the German advance until major reserves could be committed.(2)
The next day, with the front before Moscow apparently falling apart, General Georgi Zhukov was recalled from Leningrad and ordered to report to the capital. On 10 October, he was appointed Commander of the West Front, responsible for all the defences west of the Soviet capital. He was to have a decisive influence on the approaching battle.
Zhukov’s immediate priority was to stabilise the front. He requested Stalin to begin transferring large reserves toward Moscow. The State Defence Committee, the Party’s Central Committee and the Supreme Command took measures to halt the enemy advance. Troop movements began on 7 October, reinforcing the concentric defence belts facing west. A total of 14 rifle divisions, 16 tank brigades and more than 40 artillery regiments were taken from the supreme Headquarters Reserve and adjoining fronts.(3) They totalled some 90,000 men. Remnants of units that had cut their way out of the German double encirclements were filtered into the same defence lines.
In addition, existing West Front air forces were reinforced by Maj-Gen Klimov’s 6th Fighter Corps, all the fighter squadrons from the Moscow Military District, several long-range fighter divisions and four newly formed squadrons. On 13 October the State Defence Committee issued order number 0345, calling for maximum effort from the highest commander to the lowliest Red Army private. ‘Cowards and panic-mongers’ – any soldier who gave up a position without authorisation – would be ‘shot on the spot’ for crimes against the state.(4)
The power of the Communist Party lay in the cities. Its instruments of state reached out to control the geographical expanse of Russia from these political vantage-points. This explains the superhuman effort made to defend centres such as Leningrad, the cradle of the Bolshevik ideology, and Moscow, the capital of the Soviet apparatus – and later Stalingrad, the city that bore Stalin’s name. Hitler’s own totalitarian ideological convictions granted intuition that enabled him to discern the intrinsic value of such objectives. To despatch a rival ideology with lethal certainty necessitated the destruction of the primary cities of the Soviet Union: to blockade them, level them to the ground and disperse the populations. In choosing to conduct a Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation) the German regime ignored the possibility of exploiting home-grown dissatisfactions with the Soviet system, evident in rural areas. The Teutonic hordes portrayed in Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky playing in Russian cinemas, with images of German Knights burning babies alive, was perceived in the Russian nationalist psyche as being not far from the truth.
The opportunity to exploit internal political contradictions, which the German staff achieved in 1917 by aiding Lenin, was forgone in 1941. Major Ivan Nikitowitsch Kononov, the commander of the Russian 436th Rifle Regiment, cut off in the Vyazma pocket, claimed ‘an atmosphere of panic reigned within [Nineteenth] Army… the soldiers only attacked under considerable pressure from the political apparatus.’ This negative view of resistance inside the pocket was shared by his army commander, Lt-Gen Lukin. In his view, shared with his German captors after being wounded and taken prisoner, the infantry ‘did not demonstrate the necessary will to break out. They would rather go into captivity’. They were ‘driven’ into offering themselves in their thousands as victims ‘time and again’ in failed break-out attempts. A number of high-ranking Soviet generals captured at this time were eventually to switch loyalties against the communist cause. Lukin explained:
‘The farmer wants land, the worker a part of the industry he was promised… If misery and terror reign and above all a cheerless existence, then you could understand that these people would positively welcome being freed from Bolshevism.’
An alternative regime to Stalin was therefore conceivable. One could justifiably fight against ‘the hated Bolshevik system,’ claimed General Lukin, ‘without thereby compromising one’s claim to be a Russian patriot’.(5) No such options were offered to the Soviet front soldier.
‘We have not seen a single one of our own aircraft in the last few days,’ wrote Major Schabalin with the Soviet Fiftieth Army on 7 October. ‘We are giving up cities with practically no resistance.’ Within three days he was on the run from pursuing German forces inside the pocket. His health was deteriorating and now it was snowing heavily. ‘Masses of cars and people’ were on the roads, mute testimony to the defeat and disintegration of the Russian armies. A colleague from the 217th Rifle Division told him that they had suffered 75% casualties. Resistance was collapsing all around. ‘Where are the rear areas and where is the front?’ he wrote on 11 October. ‘It is difficult to say,’ he reflected, ‘the noose around the Army is being drawn ever tighter.’ Two days later the situation had become even more tenuous.
‘The enemy has pressed us together in a circle. All around was the uninterrupted sound of gunfire, an unbroken barrage of artillery duels, mortars and machine guns – danger and fear for practically the whole day.’
Life was reduced to short snatches of rest during lulls, in woods, marshes and night bivouacs. He was soaked and cold. ‘I have not slept since 12 October,’ Schabalin complained, ‘or read a newspaper since the 2nd.’(6)
Pocket fighting was an unremitting nightmare for the Soviet soldier. Anatolij Tschernjajew, an infantry platoon commander, said, ‘the worst was when the Germans sent over their reconnaissance groups at nights into villages where we were accommodated, and threw grenades inside.’ This was generally the precursor to liquidation.
‘Then they went into the attack, practically surrounding the village, rolling tanks right up to us. That was truly a catastrophe, because we had absolutely nothing to use against them, no anti-tank guns or anything!’(7)
On 15 October Major Schabalin was ‘staggering about, bodies all around, constantly under fire’. His army ‘had been completely annihilated’, and he spent his final days filling in diary entries around a wood fire with soldiers he did not know. Schabalin’s body was recovered in light rain in a small village south-west of Paseka. There were no entries after 20 October. The importance of the little book was recognised by the searching German soldiers, who passed it on to the Second Army staff. Schabalin was one of thousands who failed to escape the pocket.(8)
Capture was worse than defeat. Vladimir Piotrowitsch Schirokow witnessed a column of 15,000 Soviet prisoners being driven from Vyazma to Smolensk.